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To gather insights on the state of cloud development and deployment today, we spoke with 15 executives from 13 companies that develop tools and services for companies to develop in, and deploy to, the cloud.

Here's what they told us when we asked, "What problems are being solved with cloud-based development and delivery?"

Cloud-based development and delivery is a key enabling technology, but the real key to faster and more reliable software deployment is a DevOps process that ensures testing and security are continuously performed. This helps to ensure that software doesn’t get far off the rails before it gets corrected. In the old days, software would go for months or years before problems would get identified. For us, the ability to scale elastically allows us to handle security for many thousands of applications concurrently.

Scale out resources. Test different configurations. Give the dev team ability to get resources to test software. The slf-service element is critical. How our customers are evolving different storage models: virtual machines vs. EC2 vs. containers.

We’ve developed several products and services in the cloud to make people’s lives simpler and easier: Vinli, ParkHub, Robin, Natural Dental Implants, MVP Index, Emma airport management, and many other products, solutions, and applications.

West powers integrated voice response (IVR) phone systems for banks to step up and see who is calling, from what type of mobile device seamlessly providing business value across multiple devices to provide a better customer experience without ever having to default to an operator. The cloud has made developers more effective and efficient. And it has enabled digital transformation for companies by moving from isolated systems to joining all of the dots together for more efficient and transformational companies.

The three points mentioned in the previous question – scalability, stability, and ease of use – are the issues that we expect a cloud provider to solve for us. We don’t want to have to perform work related to owning or managing hardware, or to any low-level services. Today, it doesn’t make sense for us to waste resources on something that isn’t our core business.

The automation of more deterministic processes, less variance, and less randomness. When deploying new versions, and features you can A/B test to five to 10 percent of your audience. This is easy to achieve in the cloud. High availability of data replicated in three data centers is now available to all companies. This enables start-ups and mid-sized companies to compete with large enterprises.

The connected car can process data at the car, integrating with smart city, regional, and global apps to provide predictive maintenance and numerous other applications and benefits.

Auto-scaling. Team Internet could auto scale using statistics from our software and Node.js to determine if additional resources are needed. Higher-end companies implementing microservices are using us as a frontend layer 7 router to direct traffic to an endpoint.

The cloud gives us the ability to easily focus on delivery, user transactions, and research if the service is compromised. It gives us a view of the customer experience from the outside environment. Through the cloud, we learn whether or not the problems are manifesting themselves in the customer experience.

The cloud is just other people’s servers. There’s no infrastructure. It’s easier to scale. We provide the value of ease of switching – no vendor lock-in. The same for disaster recovery scenarios. No matter where you deploy, you can throw a switch and deploy to another infrastructure.

IT modernization. Self-support capability on top of infrastructure for 12 months realized later they needed open stack because the business units were already using the cloud. IT has to be more responsive to the business units. Service providers are providing platform-as-a-service for big data analysis and other needs.

We used to set up everything from scratch. With the cloud, there’s more efficiency with less set up time by the developer. Agile development is facilitated by the cloud. We deploy to the cloud every two weeks. We’re not focused on the physical infrastructure. Build services on top of the cloud. Apps are built really fast. Leverage tools, services, and APIs from the get go.

It is often said that developers just want to code. Prior to cloud-based development and delivery, developers sometimes had to wait days or even weeks for operations to stand up an environment for them to build in. The cloud allows for the creation of an instant development environment giving the developers the “fail fast, succeed fast” environment they want and need for the rapid creation of applications.

What problems do you see being solved with cloud-based development and delivery?